How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

“The Irish are wild, feckless, and charming, or morose, repressed, and corrupt, but not especially civilized.”

Cahill suggests the Irish are an unlikely people to credit with “saving civilization” because of their supposed natural inclinations. Nevertheless, their work in copying surviving classical manuscripts served to preserve the remains of knowledge in the West after the Roman Empire fell apart. The “uncivilized,” thus, played a major role in civilization’s survival.

“Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly re-founded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exiles, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books.”

Cahill views the Irish monastics' role in copying and preserving classical knowledge through the lens of mission. This mission started with Patrick and continued under his heirs who transported it and, thus, learning to Britain and Continental Europe, where they established countless religious houses. The monastic institutions became centers of learning and sites of further knowledge preservation. Cahill believes that were it not for these religious men and women’s efforts, the world’s history would be very different, and books would have entirely vanished. Of course, this claim is exaggerated, as Cahill equates the existence of books with classical texts in Christianized Europe and does not acknowledge manuscripts that existed in Asia, for example, or in Muslim Spain.

“They were the barbari—to the Romans and undistinguished, matted mass of Others, not terrifying, just troublemakers, annoyances, things one would rather not have to deal with—non-Romans.”

The Greeks were the first to use the term barbarian, in reference to their inability to understand the languages of others. To the Greeks, the languages sounded like “bar, bar, bar.